How To: Follow a blog

Have you ever started reading a post from someone, loved their writing, but then forgot the name of the blog when you wanted to go back and read it again? Wonder what GFC, Hellocotton, or Bloglovin is? Wonder what "follow" even means? Today we're going to go over following a blog. There are many different ways to follow a blog, or set up a blog for others to follow you. 

Google Friend Connect

The most universally used method is Google Friend Connect (GFC). GFC is a gadget (see here) that allows readers to follow your blog. By selecting 'follow' the reader selects how they want to sign in to GFC, you can use a google account, yahoo account, or twitter. When you sign into blogger the blog will be added to your blog roll. Then every time you sign in you can see the updated post.

Hellocotton/ Bloglovin

Hellocotton & Bloglovin are both second party blog follower sites. The blog owner has to register their blog with one of these sites before you can follow using them. I really like using these to follow blogs because you can set them to send you a blog update email. Every day I receive an email telling me what blog updated and links to read them. You can set these to email you, every day, once a week, or never. 

RSS

This is honestly something I didn't fully understand until researching this post. It is very similar to GFC, and was one of the first ways to follow a blog. Connecting a RSS feed uploads the newest blog post into your feed reader. You have to have a feed reader to use RSS, but if you have a gmail account or a yahoo account, surprise you have a feed reader. The thing I like about RSS is that you can organize your feeds into categories, lifestyle, food, travel, faith etc. 

By Email

Google has another great gadget named 'follow by email'. Its super easy to install, and allows a reader to follow a blog by email. Its exactly what it says, you get a nice email containing the blog post. No links to click, just the post in email form. I really love this option. 

(Like I've said before, I'm a Blogger girl and have some knowledge of wordpress. I'm sure wordpress has a follow by email option. If you will like some help finding it please leave me a comment and I'll look it up for you.)

Twitter

Yes, you can use twitter to follow a blog! Most bloggers have a twitter account, which they post links to their blogs. When I blog I can promise you, you will see it posted at least three different times on twitter.  Did you know, you can use twitter on the computer and on your phone? Sign up here!  Then you can follow voices here. 

I hope you feel like you can navigate the world of following a little better now! A few tricks I've found, if you have a blog go sign up for all of these. You want readers to be able to follow you in the way that they want. Another trick I use, I have more than one email. I know seems nuts but, I have one that is my email, one that's my blog email. My blog email is how I register my blog on sites and where all of my blogs that I follow show up. Having the two emails actually helps me stay on top of emails and organized. If you have two gmail accounts, you can link them and easily hop between the two emails.

Have anything you want to know how to do? 

Email us at voicescharleston(at)gmail(dot)com 

or leave a comment below!